Your Life Torn Open, essay 3: Get over it

This article was taken from the March 2011 issue of Wired
magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before
they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional
content bysubscribing
online.

A writer who has shared his most intimate information
online argues that pooling data is literally life-saving and
humanity's next evolutionary step.

Panic about privacy has often been triggered by technology. When
Gutenberg invented his printing press, authors of the day feared
having their thoughts and identities recorded permanently and
distributed widely. The first serious discussion of a legal right
to privacy in the US came in 1890, with
the invention of the Kodak camera and the
rise of the penny press. Telephones, miniature microphones, video
cameras and RFID
chips all triggered much fretting. It should come as no
surprise, then, that the internet would provoke warnings that
privacy is dead, but those alarms will likely lead to more
regulation of privacy than ever. We need protection of our privacy
and we're getting it.

It's not privacy that concerns me now. It's publicness. I fear
our supposed privacy crisis, reputed by the media and abetted by
government, could result in our missing many of the opportunities
the net affords to connect with each other and with information. In
Germany, political and press frenzy on the topic led to 244,000
citizens exercising their Verpixelungsrecht, the right to
have their buildings pixellated in Google Street View --
desecrating the digital landscape and setting a dangerous
precedent: if Google can be told not
to take pictures of public places, will citizens be censored
next?

Half a billion people can't be wrong. That's how many of us
share friends, photos, videos, activities, locations and romantic
interests -- our lives -- on Facebook, plus much more on Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare, Blippy, blogs and social networks yet to be
imagined. "The data suggest that people are self-violating their
privacy at a humongous rate," Eric
Schmidt told me. "The clear trend is for people to get value
out of sharing more and more," Mark
Zuckerberg said in an interview.

We are sharing because it brings benefit. We meet people, make
friends and stay connected. We spread ideas. We get attention. We
gather information. We gain trust through transparency. We
collaborate through openness. We are learning how to use our new
tools to organise movements. We cross borders. We entertain
ourselves. We are served more relevant content and, yes, adverts.
We question authority.

That is precisely what the curmudgeons and incumbents of our
legacy institutions fear. Publicness shifts control. Secrecy once
granted power, now transparency does. Why else would so many
governments and corporations be so afraid of Julian Assange? He
compels the people's business to be conducted before the people.
WikiLeaks forces publicness. Facebook merely enables it. "Our
mission," Zuckerberg said, "is to make the world more open and
connected."

I live that open life. Not everything I do is or should be
public; I especially want to be careful not to drag others into my
glasshouse. Yet I have blogged, tweeted, published and broadcast
about many experiences, including the most private: my penis and
how it no longer functions after surgery for prostate cancer. Can't
get much more public than that, now, can I? But good has come of
it. I received support and information no doctor's pamphlet could
supply. I inspired men to get tested. I helped others through
surgery, people who would not have known to reach out to me had I
not been public. I could bring attention to a disease that gets too
little notice.

Publicness disarms stigmas. It provokes generosity. It increases
knowledge. I have learned online how much is to be gained from
sunlight. The internet is our new tool of publicness. It is vital
we protect its openness and its power against censorship born of
tyranny or overregulation born of the fear of the new. What's
public is a public good. Diminish that and it is we, the public,
who lose.

Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do? will
publish his next book, Public Parts, later this year

Comments

Nice heads up on what's happening with Japanese laborers and the phones in their pockets.However, it was pretty crazy the way that the virtues of social media were suddenly given a celebration as the article was closing out, considering the lame olive branch to privacy/individuality at the end. It's good to show what this tech can do to help people organize against an old, cruel, and crumbling dictatorship, of course. But really, holding up an application that shows the tracking scripts that are happening at various websites; that shows the sort of data that is being accessed; and that also has options for blocking offensive scripts is not going to be of use to my mother, the retirees she meets at the shopping mall on the weekend, my high school educated co-workers, or even me when I've missed an update. It does, however, give a big excuse to Facebook and the other aggregators of our information to say that the sky is the limit, as far as they are concerned--without us really getting to know how much they are concerned, in fact, and about doing what.Self-regulatory? For those who aren't fluent in scripts? And who haven't yet thought of everything that might be done with what is surrendered, no matter how complex and surprising the options might be (surprising, that is, relative to those that make a career of data exploitation)? Make no mistake, aggregators will always seek this sort of advantage, but the non-tech savvy are just as human and worthwhile as the rest of us. This sort of battle is a waste of time, and the public good--for individuals, for citizens--seems to call for accountability from the enforcement agencies (which could, and often probably are, monitoring this anyhow) and the corporations, entrepreneurs, and digital gurus that are often more concerned with the efficient spread of their technology than they are with the individual well-being of those using it. Many (most?) are looking at and clicking at a computer screen that looks quite clean, beautiful, and friendly.However, I applaud the time given in this article to the serious concerns about the trajectories here. Tribalism brings with it boundaries to thought and behavior, just as sharing shatters those boundaries of information. "The citizen" is a great advancement, but yes, the citizen lives in a society. As usual, greed and deception are the dangers. Let's not let the "Tribe" seem too attractive--to me it seems more like a step backwards, for the sake of a business model or some 'big-minded' spiritual/morality pyramid scheme or something.

billl

Feb 20th 2011

"Half a billion people can't be wrong."This is where this "argument", if it can be graciously termed as such, completely falls apart.Of course people can be wrong, and the number of people who believe something does not make it true.

Dis

Feb 20th 2011

One of the biggest downsides of this new social norm towards increased publicness is what happens to those who refuse to participate. As a young person without a Facebook account or any social media presence I face increasing peer pressure and stigma for not "sharing" more of my life with everyone I meet. The social norm has become that by the second time two people meet they've already researched eachother on facebook and know many details of eachother's lives. Not using these networks throws some people off and makes them think you must be hiding something. (despite the fact that if I really was some sort of psyco the first thing I would do would be to create a facebook account and make it PG so as to allay suspicion, but most people don't seem to grasp this) I already pay an incredible social price for not "sharing" and this only gets stronger with time. I pray that society will maintain some accommodation for those like me who abhor the idea of making any details of our lives public.